Indiana GOP lt. governor candidate’s unconventional path to nomination

(The Center Square) – This election year in Indiana at the Republican Party’s state convention, pastor Micah Beckwith overcame the choice of party leaders and of the gubernatorial candidate and obtained the nomination to be the state’s GOP candidate for lieutenant governor.

Indiana state Rep. Julie McGuire was the choice of GOP gubernatorial candidate Mike Braun as well as the choice of the party, but was beat out by Beckwith in June after a close vote of delegates.

In Indiana, the Republican lieutenant governor candidate is nominated after a vote of about 1,700 delegates at the GOP state convention. For decades, Indiana’s lieutenant governor has simply been “affirming whoever the governor wants,” Beckwith told The Center Square. “That’s not what a vote is. We don’t vote to affirm a politician’s wishes. We vote to tell the politician what our wishes are.”

In order to change the Hoosier precedent and win his way to joining Braun on the ticket, Beckwith had a long and busy road to trek, he told The Center Square.

“It’s a lot of work,” Beckwith said. “We were very much on the ground for probably a year and half, just going to places where we knew potential delegates were going to be.”

Beckwith said his key to victory was campaigning to the people.

“Ultimately, you can go around the system and the apparatus of the machine … if you just go to the people,” he said.

Beckwith told The Center Square that he believes grassroots political movements are a trend in the nation at large. Republican and Democrat voters alike are dissatisfied with their respective parties and want a party that “works for the people and doesn’t work for the ruling class,” Beckwith said. “It’s supposed to be servants of the people, and not kings and queens who lord over the people”

Beckwith stressed the importance of being “educated in the process.” By this he means asking why one’s state elections, nominations, and so forth operate in the manner they do – and if that’s the way it should be done.

“I think you have to understand the system that we are moving within,” Beckwith said. “We’ve got to really be an educated electorate. And if we’re not, that’s when we will start just being led like blind sheep to the slaughter.”

“No matter what industry you’re going into,” it is important to ask “why” concerning the system, Beckwith said.

Although he would never have considered running for lieutenant governor if asked four years ago, Beckwith acknowledged that he did not “come out of nowhere.” He’s been “standing up for people’s rights and their dignity” for around five years by “protesting the [COVID] shutdowns, fighting for people’s medical liberty, writing religious exemptions for people as a pastor all over the state,” he said.

“The Bible says the Lord ordains your steps,” Beckwith said, referring to Psalm 37:23. “You might plan your path, but the Lord is the one who directs your steps. And that’s, I think, exactly what happened in my case.”

Beckwith is married and lives with his wife and two children in Noblesville, Indiana. He is the pastor at the Noblesville campus of Life Church, as well as a small business owner of a “non-profit that trains up next generation worship leaders,” he said. Growing up with a father in the dairy industry, however, Beckwith’s beginnings were in agriculture.